"We have been fortunate enough to have worked over the past nine months with Francis Moran and Associates to deliver virtual CMO services for our company, and so far it has been highly effective. With this relationship, we get access to a level of experience and expertise which would be unaffordable to us if we were to hire a full-time equivalent." Dave McIlhagga, Founder and CEO

"When I hired Francis Moran to lead our marketing efforts in 2011, I had very high expectations. We needed to completely rebuild our marketing from the ground up. Francis and his team not only met those high expectations but exceeded them. He brought a very high level of strategic thinking, professionalism and creativity to our organization that will be felt for many years to come in our quest to build a successful IT company."
Marty Hilsenteger, Founder and CEO

We Bring Technology to Market.

I got a call last week from my incumbent Canadian telecom services provider eager to justify its existence to me.

We all get these calls from time to time. One of those “how can we serve you better” calls. This shouldn’t have been surprising, considering how my service provider’s top rival had been crawling all over my neighbourhood the past couple of weeks installing new fibre services.

I don’t mind taking a call in the middle of a workday if the intent truly is to find a better way to serve me, and for less money, to boot.

But my patience had worn thin after 20 minutes on the phone while this less-than-nimble customer service rep fumbled around; it was all for the sake of a mere $7 a month, after all. Then I got lost in some on-hold void waiting to seal the deal with the verifier.

I finally hung up at the 30-minute mark. There was no profusely apologetic followup call through the remainder of that day. In fact, the service rep didn’t call back until the very same time the next day, when I had less time to spare. I didn’t take the call. She never left a message. Maybe I’ll call them back later this week. Or maybe I’ll call those other guys about their fibre service.

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“Don’t disclose your invention or you’ll lose your patent rights!” This is the type of advice that you will typically get in a coffee shop, or over a beer around 5:30 in the evening before you head home. Is this true?

Well the answer really is, “Yes and no.” How can this be?

The answer is that you will lose your patent rights in Europe and countries generally that adopt a standard of “absolute world novelty” as a requirement for granting a patent. I like to describe this as requiring that an invention be “pristine” in order to qualify for a patent grant under this standard. But you will not lose your patent rights in Canada, and not in certain other important countries, simply by disclosing the invention yourself. At least, you will not lose your patent rights immediately.

At least four countries in the world — Canada, USA, Australia and the Republic of South Korea — provide an unqualified one-year grace period to excuse public disclosures made by an inventor (or applicants claiming rights under an inventor meaning assignees). A number of other countries, such as Japan, do have grace periods but they are often limited to six months and in some cases only protect certain types of disclosures. All countries around the world are required by an international convention to give a period of protection against an applicant’s own disclosures where the disclosures occur at a recognized international exhibition, according to Paris Convention Article 11.

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Every Friday we summarize the top articles we read over the week. This week, we loved articles that were published on Entrepreneur, Gigaom, Fast Company, Spin Sucks and memeburn.

First up, an article about the perks of working for a small business rather than corporate giants, followed by a post on raising $2 million online. Third, a piece on how stories can be infectious. Finally, we’ve got an advice post on how PR professionals can become better makers and last, a piece that introduces the concept of feature-market fit.

In this article, Gene Marks asks how small businesses can compete with corporate giants for talented employees. To him, the answer is easy. Although small businesses may not be able to offer the money, benefits or sex appeal of the big guys, they can offer less bureaucracy, greater flexibility and a family away from family.

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TiE, one of the largest networks of entrepreneurs and business people in the world, is bringing its legendary networking conference, TiECon, to Canada for the first time ever next week. I’ve been to a couple of TiECon events in Boston and am looking forward to the combination of inspirational speakers and full-contact networking when TiECon Canada rolls into Ottawa on Thursday and Friday.

More than 45 speakers will make presentations over the two-day event, with Thursday’s activities taking place at City Hall in downtown Ottawa and Friday’s at the Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata, nicely catering to the two main centres of entrepreneurial activity in this city. Headlining the list of speakers are keynotes Vivek Wadhwa from Singularity University; Paul Singh, a venture partner at 500 Startups (and doubtless less profane than his colleague Dave McClure); TiE Global chairman Ashok Rao; Bluecat Networks founder Michael Hyatt; Brad Loiselle, Author of Keep Moving 4ward; and Montreal’s Julien Smith, founder of Breather.com, who will speak at the closing gala Friday evening.

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I deal with lots of executives who are good presenters — in some cases, really good presenters. But, they choose to work with a presentation coach because they want to become remarkable presenters. Remarkable presentations are memorable and inspiring, and they cause the audience to take action.

Inevitably, during an executive’s career, he or she is required to deliver a monumental presentation — to land that big contract, to attract that strategic investor, to solidify oneself as the right leader for the job. This is when delivering a good presentation isn’t good enough. Something special is needed.

Being a remarkable presenter is hard work. It takes lots of time, effort, and resources. The payback is huge and in some cases game-changing. Here are just a couple of ideas for getting from great to remarkable:

Are surveys the last great Potemkin village of media relations?

Grigory Potemkin was a Russian nobleman who, in an effort to impress his benefactor, empress and lover, is supposed to have erected facades of villages throughout Crimea when Catherine the Great came on an excursion through the southern regions of her empire in 1787[...]

By Daylin Mantyka We’re startup-heavy this week for Friday’s roundup and have selected some great content from Forbes, Entrepreneur, ZDNet, the Globe and Mail and The Kernel. We’ve got two great articles on raising capital and growing your business. We found an interesting post about dealing with non-performers in your company and another about finding [...]

It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]